Devaluation blues

All around me I see signs of the second law of thermodynamics - the one that says that things have a tendency to lose steam, run down, decay - expressed in human society. The examples that spring immediately to mind are schooling, money, words, and food, each of which seem to be worth less with the passing of time. But in fact, each case is very different.

First of all, I think that schooling is on the whole and in the longer run probably not getting worse, as everybody loves to say ("in my time, ..."), but better. Yes, there will be temporary ups and downs (in the order of magnitude of years, decades, and even generations), but collectively we know more now than a hundred years ago, and much more than several thousands of years ago, and schooling has definitely played a part in this. (This is by the way not contrary to the second law of thermodynamics: it acknowledges the existence of local anomalies, all it is concerned with is the the entropy of the system as the whole).

As for money (and the price of houses), its value goes up and down too. Of course, it has gone down now for a very long time, but this, I think, is linked to the fact that our economy is almost completely built on the idea that you have to grow to survive, which in fact is not necessarily true. There is also such a thing as stasis, and it might be good if we were to embrace that idea.

I already mentioned the devaluation of words in a previous entry, although I was talking specifically of curse words. But the same happens to any emotionally charged word, such as those indicating race, ethnic origin, culture, sexual orientation, etc. In the west, we have been obsessed with this long before the term "political correctness" was coined, as is evidenced by the long succession of names for migrant workers in Dutch society over the past fifty or sixty years.

And then we have food (and other consumables), which is suffering from the entropy of over-processing. It is like "overproducing" a record: there comes a point when every attempt at improving something just makes it worse. And I think we reached that point with food quite a while back. Here is my personal things-I-love-to hate list: decaf coffee, low-tar low-nicotine cigarettes, beer without alcohol, cola without sugar, hamburgers without fat, mayonnaise without eggs. (I could go on, but I am beginning to lose my appetite).

Last but not least, life itself is becoming less sacred. The Catholic Church may not yet realize it, but we have come to the point where having humongous families is no longer an option, or at least, not for all of us (I recently read that having large families is becoming a status symbol among rich American suburbanites, but I imagine this is just another local anomaly, which will iron itself out in the end).